Battlestar Galactica RPG

YOUR OWN VERSION OF THE TRUTH?

There are several good things about this game.

Firstly. It deals specifically with the earlier seasons, rather than the less coherent (IMHO) recent batch of episodes. There's still that air of mystery regarding the cylons and how deeply they've pentrated the core of humanity. There's a lot of righteous stuff here for the 'fan' including charcater descriptions, technology and background and nice layouts of the ships (they aren't deckplans though), and good info on equipment - though more could probably have been made of this (see firearms hmm).

Second. YOU DON'T HAVE TO FOLLOW THE SERIES. That is, you don't have to follow canon. You can make it all up to suit your style of campaign, with cyclons in the fleet or not in the fleet, military or civilian campaigns. To be honest, you could easily steal a basic plot from any scifi or manga (Mobile suit Gundam Seed springs to mind) and run a BSG game with it. Who needs a battlestar, why not use a bunch of heavy cruisers or something.

Finally. This system just exudes 'cinematic' style play. That's a term which has been misued in many games. Here - it seems to work. From the GM's perspective you can feel, tension in the air, as the charcater sheet is designed around the complications and experince of the character. Combat is so smooth and fluid here, and if something gets missed - it doesen't seem to matter as much as it would in Traveller or d20. I would recommend a civilian and military character for each player in a campaign, and taking the whole thing in a different direction. Nice Game.

Maybe the Cylons are just misunderstood after all?